Chris Pratt has been acting since 2000, but it's only been in the last couple years that he's gained notoriety as a movie star. Many folks know him for his turns in Guardians of the Galaxy, Jurassic World and The LEGO Movie, but it wasn't always this easy for him to obtain juicy roles. As an example, Pratt nearly missed out on appearing in 2011's Moneyball because he was considered to be too fat.
During his first few years on NBC's Parks & Recreation, Chris Pratt gained a fair amount of weight. It wasn't a problem for him at first acting-wise, but the actor revealed to Vanity Fair that changed when he auditioned to play baseball player Scott Hatteberg in Moneyball. Pratt stated:
That was the first time I heard someone say, 'We're not gonna cast you---you're too fat.' So I decided to drop the weight, like in wrestling. I couldn't afford a trainer, so it was all running and crash-dieting and cutting alcohol.
Although Moneyball wasn't the first movie that Chris Pratt ever appeared in, he was more well known during this time as a TV star, be it for playing Harold Brighton Abbot on Everwood or Andy Dwyer on Parks & Recreation. Due to accumulating that weight in the latter series, it nearly cost him his Moneyball role, but he put in the work to drop those pounds, and the rest is history. Based off the true-life story of the Oakland Athletics general manager Billy Beane trying to put together a new team, Moneyball saw Chris Pratt playing Scott Hatteberg, a first baseman who had been injured before his recruitment.
It's funny that Chris Pratt mentioned how cutting alcohol helped with his Moneyball weight loss, because when he dropped some pounds for Guardians of the Galaxy, that carried over to his return to Parks & Recreation, and Andy Dwyer attributed his weight loss to not drinking beer anymore. That's it. If only it were that easy. Although Pratt lost an appropriate amount of weight to achieve the athletic look, he later mentioned in the Vanity Fair profile that the first time he "truly bulked up" was when he played Justin in Zero Dark Thirty. Since then, he's been keeping in good shape for his action-heavy roles, including Peter Quill, a.k.a. Star-Lord, in Guardians of the Galaxy, Owen Grady in Jurassic World and Josh Faraday in The Magnificent Seven. Being an action star has its benefits in Hollywood, but it also means maintaining the right figure consistently.
Chris Pratt can currently be seen alongside Jennifer Lawrence in Passengers, and he'll return to the big screen reprising Peter Quill in Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 on May 5, 2017.
